So would I.
But from what I understand from the discussions with @BenWhately, both on this forum and during last Friday’s meeting, this will not happen unless Memrise is so broken that they could no longer support the costs of keeping community courses running.
@cos has done a nice brief here:
Wow, guess I’ll be cancelling my subscription to Memrise. Mems were the primary reason I bought a subscription and RECOMMENDED Memrise to friends and family. Incredibly disappointing. I really enjoyed the new illustrated interface, and cannot imagine why you’d remove the one feature that made Memrise special from all the other platforms I considered.
The only way I’ll come back is if you add in Mems again. This is going to set me back at least a month or two in learning Japanese as I try to create a new system and try to migrate over my progress. I’m so sad.
Ben Whately, a co-founder of Memrise, has provided an explanation of why they would do this here:
It may not be a very satisfactory answer, though.
Same here, I’m genuinely baffled by their claim that Mems are marginally used. I’ve thought for years that mems are the hidden weapon that made Memrise so amazingly helpful (and fun), especially for Western users like me learning tons of unique visual character systems like Japanese Kanji. Also, as an autistic person, having concrete image association gave me SUCH a boost in visualization and recall.
Also, I genuinely looked forward to learning new words and seeing the creative associations other people came up with. I felt connected to the community, and motivated to give back by coming up with & sharing my own mems. I loved doing it, and felt like I was connected to a bigger story as well all crowdsource our knowledge together.
Hope I can find a way to have this experience with Anki.
Ben still refuses to explain why they can’t simply leave the current site be while working on the new project in the background, instead of opting to hack apart the active site while working to shift it into the new project.
Indeed. I’ve asked the question here and I’m still waiting for an answer.
Can you, please, just leave the old version of the website?
I don’t understand why you can’t just leave it.
It is not that hard, doesn’t require much time or effort from you.
Without mems the sessions are just boring, new colors are pale and depressing. I want to learn here, but new design is so demotivating. And I can’t even enjoy my last days here, because I keep being reminded that after December 31 I’ll be forced to used to use the version of the website that makes me wanna puke. I just really don’t understand why? Why do you do this to the website I loved?
I have been learning some Danish on the app, using the official Memrise course and - like many others, I assume - I only just saw that there was an option for making mems recently. I just happened to scroll down a bit more than I usually needed to and there was a mem-making option which I totally hadn’t realized was even there.
Was this option publicised elsewhere on the app? Was there a special level at the beginning explaining the concept of mems and what they can be used for? I don’t recall seeing anything like that.
It is ridiculous to say, “We are removing mems because nobody used them” when a) the option for making them was practically invisible and b) the option wasn’t even publicized in the first place.
Very disappointed.
I remember my first course on Memrise was the official Swedish course, and at that time there were lots of mems there. The official videos were great, too, but people spoke so fast in them that I could barely understand them as a beginner.
Mems helped and motivated me more. Some people had put great efforts in creating them, especially one person gave us all sorts of impressions out of every day life in Sweden: photos of book covers, jokes, items, sayings, sign posts, names of films, etc. all in relation to the new vocabulary. And other than now it did not disturb the learning flow, because the first mem was shown at once when the new word appeared, so it often helped me because I could just react spontaneously - many mems really made my day! I loughed out loud and never forgot the word again!
Now mems are mostly hidden and I have to interrupt my learning flow to click and chose. And what’s worse: in official courses mems have all disappeared for quite a while now…
I bet that many new learners don’t even know they exist…And all the user created courses are very much hidden as well…So it is no wonder when people don’t use them. I have got the impression, the Memrise team did everything they could to make mems as hidden and unattractive to use as possible, because they wanted to get rid of them, and now they tell us: no, it is not us who want to dump them, but you, the users don’t like them…That’s a very awful way of psychological manipulation I think…
It amazes me how they went from a really well-designed fun looking clean website with tons of cool and useful features to the crap yellow bland life sucking featureless pile of trash we have now. It really is the most perplexing series of decisions. What in gods name happned? lol
I totally agree, Christiane!
I created mems at the beginning of learning Hungarian in 2016. I did it only for a few words, those who were difficult to remember. In 2018 I stopped using mems.
Now I create my individual mems and upload them as jpg/png-files. It’s more comfortable for me.
I’m currently creating and using a new “German – Hungarian” course. At current stage of development, the course is only for private use. But I plan to make it public.
In addition to the mems, I uploaded further information (links to websites, related words, comments, etc.) as text. Btw: I asked for permission to utilize the images, audios and links.
The above screen shot shows what information turn up, when I learn a new word, don’t remember a word or make a mistake.
I’m aware of, that this can’t solve the problem of disappeared mems.
@ BenWhately I hope you can support the way to get the mems back to the user in a user-optimized and user-friendly way.
" keep learning them as usual, but in a nicer, more intuitive experience"
Oh look, a flying pig.
Everything went to pot when they sacked the cat.
I use Memrise primarily to learn lists of words and sentences that I’ve created myself, for a real-world language that I’m learning and a constructed language I’ve made. I do use audio tests, to learn auditive skills as well as visual, but I don’t use mems. Can I continue using Memrise this when the new version is released? Or will support for these things be (partially) dropped?
(I am not a user of mems themselves, but I totally understand that it can be extremely frustating if you’ve spent countless hours creating mems only to see Memrise dropping support for mems. In your situation, I’d be similarly upset!)
Unfortunately, they are not just dropping support, they are completely getting rid of them. As in, bazillions of Mems will just vanish in about two weeks, and you will not have the option to use them anymore for lord knows what stupid reason. They are not even putting them out anywhere else. It’s exceptionally, jaw-droppingly brazen and infuriating on every single level. There was not enough notice given, not even close, if you rely on other people’s Mems too.
Sorry, I’m extra saucy today because the laptop I was saving all my favorites of other people’s Mems on crashed yesterday as in dead-dead, so now I have NONE of them on top of everything else, and have to start all over getting in what I can in this super-narrow window. And I’ve paid into this website for the next 9 months, so I’m basically feeling pretty bitter and conned considering the Mems are what I paid for in the first cursewords place. Yeah, it’s…it’s stunningly poor customer service. Just absolutely maddening.
That implies they will be deleted, and gone for good. From what Memrise told us recently, that is not the case. Mems will not be erased, but will be made inaccessible for some period of time. Eventually, they want to make them accessible again, but they don’t know how long that will take.
As far as I know, nobody from Memrise has explained exactly why they can’t leave Mems accessible, but @BenWhately said this is related to the process of separating the classic Memrise platform from the new Memrise they’re building. He indicated that there is some problem that makes it really hard for them to keep Mems accessible while they implement this separation. Yes, that is vague, I don’t know any more than that, so take that as you will. It still sucks, but it’s not the same as what your message suggests.
An answer about the technicalities as to why they need to take mems down for a period of time is necessary to make people less frustrated.
Maybe I’m more cynical, it’s just been my experience with websites (ex: goodreads, facebook, spotify) that when a feature is “temporarily” removed, it is removed in the hopes that people will eventually forget because short attention spans, and it does not come back later, which was the whole idea. However, I do hope you’re right!
Since me, like you, regards mems as something very important, I’ll keep bringing this to people’s attention from time to time.
